Welcome to the team, Jack!

October 15, 2018

Today we welcome our new Web Developer, Jack! We sat down with him a few days ago to get to know him a little more. We discussed everything from hobbies to why he is passionate about development and how he got into it.

1. Introduce us to the world of Jack

Hi I’m Jack, I was born in Wakefield but lived in Nottinghamshire for most of my childhood. Eventually moved up to Salford for university (Journalism & English Lit) and I’ve stayed here ever since. Outside of work I play the bass in a middling indie band, I’m a big fan of tapas and really should get round to blogging again.

2. How did you get into being a developer and what do you like about it?

Well, when I got out of university I wanted to write about football and music, along with every other 22 year old. But not many people really wanted to pay you to write things, especially outside of London, and I found myself being quite good at actually uploading other people’s articles to the internet.

I think at one point someone asked if I could make a paragraph a different colour, so I opened Inspect Element and worked out the CSS rule to change that paragraph and started to teach myself code from there. I kept teaching myself this kind of thing and eventually found that people would actually pay me for that sort of thing!

The thing I like most about developing is that there’s always a new problem to solve or a new framework to learn. You’re very rarely doing the same thing everyday, so things don’t get tedious. Except for testing HTML table emails for older versions of Outlook.

3. What’s your advice for being a good developer and do you have any tips?

Approach everything as methodically as possible and understand the rules for whatever code or framework you’re working in. If you’ve got those down the solutions tend to present themselves.

Also I find that a lot of problem solving can happen away from the computer. Writing things down or talking through an issue out loud can really help.

4. What are you looking forward to with joining J B Cole UK?

I’ve been very marketing focused in my last role, so really excited to be diving back into some proper coding challenges. Also in most of my previous roles I’ve been the only developer in the department (and sometimes even the company) so I’m really looking forward to working as part of a development team.